Tag Archives: B2B

Today’s marketing and business development professionals use a wide array of big data collection and analytical tools to create and refine sophisticated profiles of market segments and their customer bases. These are deployed in order to systematically and scientifically target and sell their goods and services in steadily changing marketplaces.

These processes can include, among a multitude of other vast data sets and methodologies, demographics, web user metrics and econometrics. Businesses are always looking for a data-driven edge in highly competitive sectors and such profiling, when done correctly, can be very helpful in detecting and interpreting market trends, and consistently keeping ahead of their rivals. (The Subway Fold category of Big Data and Analytics now contains 50 posts about a variety of trends and applications in this field.)

I will briefly to this add my own long-term yet totally unscientific study of office-mess-ographics. Here I have been looking for any correlation between the relative states of organization – – or entropy – – in people’s offices and their work’s quality and output. The results still remain inconclusive after years of study.

One of the most brilliant and accomplished people I have ever known had an office that resembled a cave deep in the earth with piles of paper resembling stalagmites all over it. Even more remarkably, he could reach into any one of those piles and pull out exactly the documents he wanted. His work space was so chaotic that there was a long-standing joke that Jimmy Hoffa’s and Judge Crater’s long-lost remains would be found whenever ever he retired and his office was cleaned out.

Speaking of office-focused analytics, an article posted on VentureBeat.com on March 5, 2016, entitled CMOs: ‘Technographics’ is the New Demographics, by Sean Zinsmeister, brought news of a most interesting new trend. I highly recommend reading this in its entirety. I will summarize and add some context to it, and then pose a few question-ographics of my own.

New Analytical Tool for B2B Marketers

Marketers are now using a new methodology call technography to analyze their customers’ “tech stack“, a term of art for the composition of their supporting systems and platforms. The objective of this approach is to deeply understand what this says about them as a company and, moreover, how can this be used in business-to-business (B2B) marketing campaigns. Thus applied, technography can identify “pain points” in products and alleviate them for current and prospective customers.

Using established consumer marketing methods, there is much to be learned and leveraged on how technology is being used by very granular segments of users bases. For example:

By virtue of this type of technographic data, retailers can target their ads in anticipation of “which customers are most likely to shop in store, online, or via mobile”.

Next, by transposing this form of well-established marketing approach next upon B2B commerce, the objective is to carefully examine the tech stacks of current and future customers in order to gain a marketing advantage. That is, to “inform” a business’s strategy and identify potential new roles and needs to be met. These corporate tech stacks can include systems for:

Technographics can provide unique and valuable insights into assessing, for example, whether a customer values scalability or ease-of-use more, and then act upon this.

As well, some of these technographic signals can be indicative of other factors not, per se, directly related to technology. This was the case at Eloqua, a financial technology concern. They noticed their marketing systems have predictive value in determining the company’s best prospects. Furthermore, they determined that companies running their software were inclined “to have a certain level of technological sophistication”, and were often large enough to have the capacity to purchase higher-end systems.

As business systems continually grow in their numbers and complexity, interpreting technographic nuances has also become more of a challenge. Hence, the application of artificial intelligence (AI) can be helpful in detecting additional useful patterns and trends. In a July 2011 TED Talk by Ted Slavin, directly on point here, entitled How Algorithms Shape Our World, he discussed how algorithms and machine learning are needed today to help make sense out of the massive and constantly growing amounts of data. (The Subway Fold category of Smart Systems contains 15 posts covering recent development and applications involving AI and machine learning.)

Technographic Resources and Use Cases

Currently, technographic signals are readily available from various data providers including:

They parse data using such factors as “web hosting, analytics, e-commerce, advertising, or content management platforms”. Another firm called Ghostery has a Chrome browser extension illuminating the technologies upon which any company’s website is built.

The next key considerations are to “define technographic profiles and determine next-best actions” for specific potential customers. For instance, an analytics company called Looker creates “highly targeted campaigns” aimed at businesses who use Amazon Web Services (AWS). The greater the number of marketers who undertake similar pursuits, the more they raise the value of their marketing programs.

Technographics can likewise be applied for competitive leverage in the following use cases:

Sales reps prospecting for new leads can be supported with more focused messages for potential new customers. These are shaped by understanding their particular motivations and business challenges.

Locating opportunities in new markets can be achieved by assessing the tech stacks of prospective customers. Such analytics can further be used for expanding business development and product development. An example is the online training platform by Mindflash. They detected a potential “demand for a Salesforce training program”. Once it became available, they employed technographic signals to pinpoint customers to whom they could present it.

Enterprise wide decision-making benefits can be achieved by adding “value in areas like cultural alignment”. Familiarity with such data for current employees and job seekers can aid businesses with understanding the “technology disposition” of their workers. Thereafter, its alignment with the “customers or partners” can be pursued. Furthermore, identifying areas where additional training might be needed can help to alleviate productivity issues resulting from “technology disconnects between employees”.

Many businesses are not yet using technographic signals to their full advantage. By increasing such initiatives, businesses can acquire a much deeper understanding of their inherent values. In turn, the resulting insights can have a significant effect on the experiences of their customers and, in turn, elevate their resulting levels of loyalty, retention and revenue, as well as the magnitude of deals done.

My Questions

Would professional service industries such as law, medicine and accounting, and the vendors selling within these industries, benefit from integrating technographics into their own business development and marketing efforts?

Could there be, now or in the future, an emerging role for dedicated technographics specialists, trainers and consultants? Alternatively, should these new analytics just be treated as another new tool to be learned and implemented by marketers in their existing roles?

If a company identifies some of their own employees who might benefit from additional training, how can they be incentivized to participate in it? Could gamification techniques also be applied in creating these training programs?

What, if any, privacy concerns might surface in using technographics on potential customer leads and/or a company’s own internal staff?